


Once Upon a Time Over the Rainbow

by TheDameintheRaininMaine



Series: For Want of a Nail [3]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/F, a and e seriously underused oz, and a pinch of Wicked or two, but nothing else oz related, dorothy's pretty much like ouat canon, like once upon a time in wonderland, mixed hodgepodged oz canon, mostly book canon, spinoff of there once was a town in maine, taking place concurrently, with some return to oz
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-26
Updated: 2018-01-26
Packaged: 2019-03-09 16:08:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,480
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13485063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheDameintheRaininMaine/pseuds/TheDameintheRaininMaine
Summary: Ruby hadn't thought to much about the shoes she'd found, until the day she put them on and her world turned upside down.Side story for There Once Was a Town in Maine, which is still in progress.





	Once Upon a Time Over the Rainbow

**Author's Note:**

> Note to longtime readers, I am still alive and am totally planning to continue There Once Was a Town in Maine, but this demanded to be started first.

Ruby barely noticed the world swirling around her before being lifted and slammed flat on her back under a beautiful blue sky. 

She sits up, her head still spinning. She vaguely hears a voice say “are you alright?”, but she’s possessed with taking in what’s in front of her. 

Wherever she’s ended up is beautiful- the flowers and trees are as vividly colored as the sky. Even the crimson blouse she had on seemed brighter than it did when she put it on this morning. She could hear birds singing and the gentle rushing of a nearby stream. Her wolf nose could pick out all sorts of new smells- animals and fruits and more that she couldn’t place. 

Wherever she was, she definitely wasn’t in Storybrooke anymore. 

Her stupification is interrupted by the sound of first the same voice from earlier, and then by a gentle bark. 

“Are you a good witch or a bad witch?” The voice asks. 

Ruby looks in the other direction, seeing that the voice is coming from a young woman with dark hair, wearing an old fashioned dress. Her barking companion is a small, brown, very ordinary looking dog. 

“I’m not a witch at all”, Ruby answers, mind still dazed. 

The other woman looks at her head tilted, “Toto only ever barks at witches.”

Ruby reaches up and touches her face to make sure she’s not bleeding. She doesn’t seem to have injured herself in the fall at least. 

“I’m not a witch. He’s probably just confused because I don’t smell like I look”. 

“What?”

Ruby shakes her head, “It’s a long story, but I’m not a witch. I don’t even know where I am, much less how I got here”. 

“Was it a storm? That’s how I first came here, and the second time was through- oh!”

Suddenly she points at Ruby’s feet. Ruby shifts and dimly realizes that one of her shoes has come off and-

The shoes. It hits her. 

They’d been sitting in her room at the inn since the day the curse broke and they fell out of the sky and hit her. She’d tried them on, thinking they might go with her girl’s night out outfit before this all happened. 

Presently, Ruby realizes only one of the shoes is still on, the other foot dangling in her argyle sock. 

“Did you know where you were coming or were you fleeing something?”

Ruby lifts her foot and removes the remaining shoe- she wouldn’t be able to walk in the uneven heels anyway- and examines it. It’s the same old fashioned buckled shoe it was earlier. 

“Are- are these shoes how I got here?”

“The silver slippers are very powerful magic, they can cross dimensions.”

Dimensions? Jesus Christ, everyone in Storybrooke had just regained their memories of home and now she was somewhere else entirely. 

But suddenly another thought rushes into her head. 

“Wait, if they can cross dimensions does that mean they can bring me home too?

“Sure, if you had them both.”

“But I don’t know what happened to the other one. It must have fallen off when they brought me here.”

“Well wherever the other one ended up, finding it might not be easy. Those slippers got me into a heap of trouble when I first came here. Come on, I’ll loan you a pair of boots. I’m Dorothy by the way”. 

The boots are lace up and made of soft leather. They’re a bit big, but beggars can’t be choosers. Dorothy had led Ruby a few hundred feet from where she had landed. The house is a rickety, all wood farmhouse, torn clear from its foundation, set at a strange angle between the grass and the road. 

Ruby sits on the end of the bed that Dorothy had pulled the boots from under, pulled them on and laced them tightly. She glances around the house. It’s barely more than a single room, and room, no electric lights, no water pump. It looks like something straight a century old, it looks more like something Red and Granny would have lived in back in the Enchanted forest. Dorothy’s standing near the bucket by the door, tipping it so that Toto could drink from it, and seemingly waiting for Ruby to be ready. 

“I guess I should probably ask….where on earth are we?”

“Not Earth”, Dorothy says, not even looking up “Oz”. 

“Oz?” Some of Ruby’s Storybrooke memories are prickling at the back of her mind. 

“We’re surrounded on all sides by deserts, so anytime someone new comes, magic is usually involved, or at least it used to be.”

“So where are you going to take me?” Ruby asks. 

“There’s been a lot of turmoil around the land lately. I’ll take you to the Emerald City, the Scarecrow might be able to give us some information, and maybe Ozma or Glinda have shown back up again.” 

Ruby’s head is swimming. The words “Emerald City” makes her want to giggle. She tucks the remaining slipper in her purse. It’s silver, she realizes, if it were red, she might have realized immediately, might have even made a joke when it fell out of the sky and hit her. 

When the two of them step outside, Ruby looks down onto the road. The bricks making it up really are a vibrant shade of gold. 

They’ve barely gotten out of sight of the house when Ruby can’t keep her questions inside. 

“How did you end up in Oz?”

“How could you tell that I’m not from here?”

Ruby laughs. After this past year, this moment almost makes her feel smart. 

“I’ve gotten pretty good at spotting things that don’t belong”. 

“When I was a little girl, I got swept up in a tornado. Darn thing took the whole house- everyone else was in the cellar of the big house Uncle Henry had spent so long building- lifted us all up and dropped me down here in Munchkinland”. 

Ruby can’t restrain a giggle at that. 

“Are there still munchkins here?”

Dorothy purses her lips. 

“Most of them headed for the city to get away from some of the magical problems that have been going through the land, but there are still probably a few holdouts like- how do you know about the Munchkins?”

“There was a movie, and a book I think…”

Ruby trails off. David had tried so hard to explain it, but it still messed with both her mind and that of singularly both Ruby and Red that there were stories about their lives that had spread across the worlds.

“About Oz? I guess that would make sense. I did talk a lot about it when I got home, and if the Wizard did in fact get back to Kansas in the balloon. He would definitely tell people, though I have doubts that they would believe him.”

She then trails off, suddenly lost in thought. The look on her face looks like the ones Snow sometimes wore, in the early days of their friendship when she hadn’t been the most forthright about her past, and Ruby chooses to let it go. 

The yellow brick road has passed through a strangely barren farmland, and is now entering a fairly thick forest. The trees here don’t look quite like they did at home, but the location still makes Ruby a bit homesick. What was even happening in Storybrooke now without her?

Then they pass a tree with a face, and Ruby is back out of her depth again. Dorothy sticks her tongue out at it, and Ruby once again chooses to stay quiet. 

At some point, Toto comes up by her side, and Ruby spares a glance at the darkening sky between the trees. 

“Uhh, what phase is the moon in right now?” she asks, trying to sound casual. 

Dorothy looks at her askance. “I don’t know, why?”

“No reason”, she responds quickly, and picks up her step. She hasn’t transformed since they were home...could she still control it?

Soon after, they reach a clearing near a river. Dorothy sighs deeply. 

“We should stop here for tonight. Tomorrow might take some strategy.”

She reaches into her basket and hands Ruby a blanket. 

“It’s warm enough that we shouldn’t need a fire, and pretty much anything that could be dangerous has left the forest by now”. 

She then stretches out beneath the tree and goes to sleep. 

Ruby is awake for some time later. Toto soon wakes too, and comes and sits beside her. She sits up and studies the small dog. 

“Thanks for not blowing my cover.” 

Her eyes turn to the night sky. She’s very far from being any kind of astronomer, but she can imagine that the stars look different here in Oz than they would at home- either of her homes. 

“I guess there really is no place like home.”


End file.
